American Fez

Repast Revisited

Fortified with a meal of more culturally congenial ingredients, I finally finished reading the essay mentioned in a post below, comparing the thoughts of Sir Thomas Browne with those of Julian of Norwich. Written by Kevin Faulkner, it's not a very long essay, being about the length of one of Browne's most meandering sentences, but does contain some complicated ideas for a magpie mind like mine on its lunch break to grapple with. 

You can read the essay for yourself here (lunch not provided)

Personally, I've aways felt that Julian is a bit too wide-eyed and sure of herself, rather like one of those friendly, itinerant young people who hand out Krishna consciousness literature at railway stations and shopping malls, but then I've only ever read her "revelations" on the Internet, which probably isn't the best environment for studying mystical ideas. And I suppose I'd be wide-eyed too if I spent all my days in a tiny cell unable to escape from the idle chit-chat of Margery Kempe.

Thomas Browne, on the other hand, as his Christian name suggests, always seems a bit of a doubter; at least the doubting mind of one who doubts because he feels there is always more to know; a sliver of hitherto unknown esoteric wisdom written in quincuncial hieroglyphs and buried with the mummified body of Gnosticus of Ruritanium (whose thumbs remain miraculously uncorrupted) beneath what is now the Unitarian Museum of Candlelight.

But Mr Faulkner's aforementioned essay is far more informative than I am, and imparts this information in a far more intelligent manner than I do. For further reading, he also maintains a fascinating personal blog called The Aquarium of Vulcan

Short, But Sweet?

Since important medical advances are contemporaneous with a drastic decline in artistic achievement, I suppose Hippocrates' famous aphorism should be flip-flopped to "ars brevis vita longa" to more accurately reflect this sorry state of affairs.

Speaking of short, the sentence above should most probably have been a simple Tweet rather than an entire blog post, considering its lack of additional sentences. Perhaps I could even have designed a graphic representation of the sentence and made a Tumblr. It's hard to know what to do these days.

Food For Thought

On lunch-break yesterday, I began reading an essay comparing Julian of Norwich's ideas to those of Sir Thomas Browne. My lunch was a falafel roll-up with hummus; an inappropriate choice of food considering my Fenland reading material, it seemed, so I eventually lost my appetite for both and finished neither. A slice of bread and a hunk of cheese would have been more complementary, I suppose. Perhaps kippered herring on toast?

So what type of lunch goes with which particular authors? It's an interesting question. Here is a short list of my own suggestions, based on practical experience.

Mary Shelley: whatever's in the fridge and can be thrown together.

Samuel Johnson: liquid lunch of strong ale.

Ovid: grapes, obviously.

Herman Melville: fish chowder or other hearty soup.

Andre Malraux: some sort of thin, plain wafer

Rosamond Lehmann: a small sugar lozenge.

William Langland: an apple.

Anthony Powell: twelve course chef's special

Mark Twain: mixed bean salad

Evelyn Waugh: two bananas 

Cicero: frankly I'd rather starve than read Cicero at lunch. 

Reverb

Musically, I have always considered the words "Greatest" and "Hits" to be mutually exclusive, since an artist's "hits" are invariably their least interesting recordings. Popularity is always an excellent indication of what to avoid: "pop music" being a case in point.

Nina Simone has released at least a zillion Greatest Hits CD compilations. Alas, none of them compile all the songs I actually want to hear on the same disc. There is a Best Of Nina Simone CD and, confusingly, a Very Best Of Nina Simone CD: which one would you buy if given the choice? Personally, I would buy neither because they both contain The Most Boring of Nina Simone, if you ask me. Consequently I'm forced to spend a small fortune on various different Nina Simone CDs in order to collect all the songs I think actually are her best. This is the price of liking the least likeable of a well-liked singer's oeuvre.

Of course, there are always the ala-carte selections available from file services such as iTunes, provided you don't mind tinny sounding music. But even here, no doubt, I will only encounter The Most Downloaded of Nina Simone, and find myself scrolling down an interminable list of her most popular songs in an endless search for the unregarded and elusive one I really want to hear.